No matter what your fight, don’t be ladylike!
God Almighty made women and
the Rockefeller gang of thieves made the ladies.
-Mother Jones
Friday July 21, 1916
From Solidarity: Miss Flynn on Organizing Women
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, organizer for the Industrial Workers of the World who recently arrived in northern Minnesota to assist with the strike of the iron miners of the Mesabi Range, on July 15th had published in that organization’s weekly journal, Solidarity, an article on the problems of organizing women. Miss Flynn encourages working women to rebel against the limits enforced against them by the prevailing attitudes which dictate that women should be “lady-like” and stick to tending home and children. Today we offer part one of the article; part two will appear in tomorrow’s Hellraisers Journal.
Problems Organizing Women
-by Elizabeth Gurley Flynn [Part I]In extending an enthusiastic welcome the Women’s Edition of Solidarity I am merely reiterating my conviction that we must here study our materials and adapt our propaganda to the special needs of women. Some of our male members are prone to underestimate this vital need and assert that the principles of the I. W. W. are alike for all, which we grant with certain reservations. They must be translated for foreigners, simplified for illiterates, and rendered in technical phrases for various industrial groups.
The textile workers discuss “one big union” in terms of warp and woof, the Joplin miners in terms of “cans of ore,” and the harvest hand in the job dialect of his seasonal work. The Western locals feel the need of a paper written in the style peculiar to their district and thus the general education progresses from the Atlantic to the Pacific.
I have heard revolutionists present a large indictment against women, which if true, constitutes a mine of reason for a special appeal based upon their peculiar mental attitudes and adapted to their environment and the problems it creates. Women are over-emotional, prone to take advantage of their sex, eager to marry and then submerged in family life, more interested in personal than social problems, are intensely selfish for “me and mine,” lack a sense of solidarity, are slaves to style, and disinclined to serious and continuous study-these are a few counts in the complaint. Nearly every charge could be made against some men and does not apply to all women, yet it unfortunately fits many women for obvious reasons.
It is well to remember we are dealing with the sex that has been denied all social rights since early primitive times, segregated to domestic life up to a comparatively recent date, and denied access to institutions of learning up to half a century ago. Religion, home, and childbearing were their prescribed spheres. Marriage was their career and to be an old maid a lifelong disgrace. Their right to life depended on their sex attraction, and the hideous inroads on the moral integrity of women, produced by economic dependence, are deep and subtle. Loveless marriages, household drudgery, acceptance of loathsome familiarities, unwelcome childbearing, were and are far more general than admitted by moralists, and have married the mind, body and spirit of women…
After a few generations, custom will accept it as natural and ethical. When Mary Wollstonecraft wrote her “Vindication of the Rights of Woman” in 1702, she was dubbed a “hyena in petticoats,” yet her views would be considered mild and conservative today. The early suffragists were mobbed and occupied the same plane in popular opinion allotted to the I. W. W. now, yet slowly the changing economic status of woman has made suffrage respectable, even fashionable. While women were merely instruments of passion or household drudges, so long as “the ideal woman was she of whom neither good nor evil was heard outside her own home” and education stopped with reading the catechism-there was no soil in which the roots of new ideals could cling or be nourished.
Today we see calm, clear-eyed women deliberating in conventions, marching in peace or suffrage parades, and enthusiastic militant ones in long and bitter strikes. It thrills us as mighty cosmic upheavals when the static of centuries moves, rises, and is changed. From this larger viewpoint, one must admit that women are forging ahead, and have really accomplished much with their limited opportunities. Given a fraction of the long eras of public, co-operative life men have passed through, the new woman whose outline we already dimly see will surely develop.
But one should not exaggerate the number of real rebel women and become over sanguine about the general outlook. There are many intelligent women who have only arrived at an intense rebellion against the handicaps placed on women, which is pithily expressed in the slogan,”Give a woman a man’s chance.” The rebel woman realizes that “a man’s chance” is not enviable under the present order and that her fight is to secure relief for all workers, irrespective of sex. Ideas do not change automatically with environment and many hold-over ones, a century behind actually, aggravate and humiliate self-respecting women…
Mis-education further teaches girls to be lady-like, a condition of inane and inert placidity. She must not fight or be aggressive, mustn’t be “tomboy,” mustn’t soil her dresses, mustn’t run and jump as more sensibly attired boys do. In Scranton recently I heard a boy say to his sister, “You can’t play with us, you’re only a girl!” I hoped she would beat him into a more generous attitude, but in her acquiescence was the germ of a pitiable inability to think and act alone, characteristic of so many women.
In the arrogance of the male child was the beginning of a dominance that culminates in the drunken miner who beats his wife and vents the cowardly spleen he dare not show the boss! Feminist propaganda is helping to destroy the same obstacles the labor movement confronts, when it ridicules the lady-like person, makes women discontented, draws them from sewing circle gossips and frivolous pastimes into serious discussions of current problems and inspires them to stand abuse and imprisonment for an idea. A girl who has arrived at suffrage will listen to an organizer, but a simpering fool who says, “Women ain’t got brains enough to vote!” or “Women ought to stay at home” is beyond hope.
[Paragraph breaks and emphasis added.]
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SOURCES
Solidarity
(Cleveland, Ohio)
-July 15, 1916
-for more on Solidarity see:
http://depts.washington.edu/iww/newspapers.shtml
Words on fire: the life and writing of Elizabeth Gurley Flynn
-ed by Rosalyn Fraad Baxandall
Rutgers University Press, 1987
https://books.google.com/books?id=mqbaAAAAMAAJ
“Hellraisers Journal: Elizabeth Gurley Flynn Arrives in Duluth to Assist Striking Miners of Mesabi Iron Range”
-by Janet Raye
https://weneverforget.org/hellraisers-journal-elizabeth-gurley-flynn-arrives-in-duluth-to-assist-striking-miners-of-mesabi-iron-range/
IMAGE
Elizabeth Gurley Flynn, Reno Gz-Jr, July 12, 1916
https://www.newspapers.com/image/147168974/
See also:
A Vindication of the Rights of Woman: With Strictures on Political and Moral Subjects
-by Mary Wollstonecraft
1891 edition
https://books.google.com/books?id=hxwEAAAAYAAJ
Union Maid – Billy Bragg & Company